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  • Commissioning Skills and Influence

Commissioning Skills and Influence

67 delegates have attended BOLD training, including:

  • DSC’s Fair Deal training programme, which focuses on organisational planning, management and governance issues for organisations involved in contracting, costing bids effectively, influencing commissioning, negotiating contracts and collaborative working;
  • Empowering the Voluntary Sector - a one-day workshop run by NAVCA in partnership with the Public Law Project, on how to use a public law approach to understand and improve relationships with public bodies;
  • Understanding Outcomes in Advice - a one-day programme delivered by Charities Evaluation Service.

Preparing for commissioning requires independent advice organisations to review how they work and to prepare for different approaches. BOLD recommends the following considerations for advice organisations.

  • Make the arguments for a mixed economy of funding – investment, grants and contracts as appropriate – and demonstrate how your services enable public bodies to meet their goals.
  • Don’t go it alone. Financial uncertainty, particularly in the face of potential competition with other providers, often leads to a breakdown in trust and we run for the bunker and stop collaborating. But this is probably the time you need your third sector colleagues and partners more than ever.
  • If you don’t have one, speak to other advice organisations about setting up a local advice forum. Make sure you contribute to building trust and openness in the forum, and making it a strong voice for independent advice. AdviceUK has a number of resources on collaborative working.
  • Familiarise yourself with the Sustainable Community Strategy and LAA for your area – you’ll find it on the local authority or Local Strategic Partnership website. Use AdviceUK’s toolkit to identify the indicators to which your service is best placed to contribute.
  • Develop a clear vision and strategy, which shows how advice contributes to the delivery of local targets.
  • Be creative. Look outside the advice sector to other services you could collaborate with to offer a more comprehensive solution to local need, for example drug and alcohol services, credit unions, housing support or care providers.
  • Focus on outcomes – what do local people need and how do your services meet that need? What difference do you make? What would be lost if you weren’t there?
  • Talk to your local authority – build relationships and remember, they are trying to pick their way through this minefield of new ways of working so offer options and solutions.
  • Don’t forget the Compact. Both local and national Compacts give good guidance on relationships between sectors and on funding and commissioning. Don’t assume your local authority colleagues are aware of them.
  • Suggest to your local authority that you jointly develop a Partnership Agreement that builds on Compact principles and sets out what you can expect of each other. You can use this process to talk about the importance of independent advice and make sure the agreement enshrines your right to self-determination and to challenge when the local authority gets it wrong.

What's your experience?

It is important that any proposals we make on commissioning work for advice organisations and for commissioners. We want advice organisations and public bodies to challenge the assumptions behind our recommendations and to tell us where we’re going in the right direction and where you think we’ve got it wrong. If you have a view on the above recommendations, e mail simon.johnson@adviceuk.org.uk